Send OSHA to SYTYCD

Should the Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigate "So You Think You Can Dance?"

For the third week in a row, a young dancer has been sidelined due to injury. The pressure of learning two high-profile, high-energy numbers of often high difficulty has already taken out two leading contenders in the last two weeks due to injury, Alex Wong and Ashley Galvan.

On Wednesday, Billy Bell, who injured his knee in rehearsal, sat out the performance show for the Top 6. Unlike the other two dancers taken out, doctors had given him the green light to dance if he felt up to it, but Bell chose not to.

Perhaps he knew he had to rest his knee in order to get it to properly heal. But such caution had a price -- he was automatically put in the bottom three for Thursday's elmination. Unlike the past two weeks, though, it will be judges and not doctors who will determine who will go home from the pool created by voters and Bell.

Judges seemed to act as if it were a coincidence or jinx that has resulted in so many injuries.

"There's something going wrong this season and we don't know what it is. We're going to bring people in to help us do warmups or something," Nigel Lythgoe said. "We'll keep our fingers crossed that he can dance next week and remain in the show."

"It's getting beyond a joke," host Cat Deeley said of the situation.

More likely, it's a systematic approach of overwork for the underpaid stars of the competition, one of whom will win $250,000, a cover story in a magazine nobody has heard of, Dance Spirit, and the flimsy title "America's Favorite Dancer."

A more endangered species on the show -- a female -- seemed to aquit herself well as Lauren Froderman performed as the last woman standing in the competition. So far this season, voters have not eliminated a single male.

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Roger Catlin is TV critic for the Hartford Courant and writes a daily column about what's on television called TV Eye. He is also on the board of the Television Critics Association. Before all of this, he was rock critic ... read more